Operating systems

teTeX is the de facto standard TeX distribution
for a wide range of Unix-type operating systems,
and serves as a building block for others. It's
easy to install and customize. teTeX is not maintained anymore; instead, TeX users should migrate to TeXlive.

LaTeX is a document preparation system for
high-quality typesetting based on TeX. It is most
often used for medium-to-large technical or
scientific documents, but it can be used for
almost any form of publishing. It is not a word
processor; instead, it encourages authors not to
worry too much about the appearance of their
documents, but to concentrate on getting the right
content.

svninfo is used to extract the revision and file
information provided by the Subversion revision
control system. To present the version
information of a document, one needs to extract
it from some kind of text inserted by the revision
control system. Subversion offers therefore the
Id keyword, which is expanded by the Subversion
update command and contains a lot of useful
information. This information is made available
through this package.

prerex is an interactive (command-line) editor and a LaTeX macro support package that can be used to create very attractive and readable prerequisite charts. A graphical front-end for the editor also provides a prerex-enabled PDF viewer. A prerequisite chart is a network of course boxes linked by prerequisite and co-requisite arrows.

TeXcount is a Perl script for counting words in LaTeX documents. It parses valid LaTeX documents counting words, headers, formulae (mathematics), and floats/begin-end groups. To run the script, you can either download it and run it on your own computer, or you can use the Web interface. TeXcount is included in the CTAN TeX/LaTeX archive, and thus included in several TeX distributions. If you have TeX installed, chances are you may already have TeXcount.